Mercedes Restaurant forced to close after decades in the Financial District

Mercedes Restaurant is closing after 24 years in the Financial District. It is located at 653 Commercial St.

Photo: Photo via Andrew D./Yelp

When Kate Riley, Leanna Lewis and Janine Galligani bought Mercedes Restaurant in 1994, they had a simple plan in mind: provide the bustling neighborhood with a fun, low key lunch destination.

“We’re off the beaten path,” Kate Riley said.

Before Riley and her partners took over the Commercial Street location, it was home to a Mexican restaurant which opened in 1967. Many of the cooks at the original restaurant stayed on through the new iteration. For decades, the Mexican fare pulled in a lunch crowd of locals familiar with the area, folks who knew to navigate the quiet alley between Kearny and Montgomery.

“We survived the dot-com boom and bust, 9/11, the Bart strikes,” Janine Galligani said. “We have cooks who have been here since the previous owners were here, so that’s 20 to 30 years at one place. There’s a lot of history.”

In recent years, the restaurant market has become increasingly competitive and operating costs continued to increase. Last year, the restaurant’s building was sold to a new owner, Riley said, and subsequently the restaurant’s rent went up.

“This was my baby before I had babies. It’s sad. We’ve been fighting this landlord for a year, but I couldn’t be more proud with how we went out. We had a good time with our customers,” said Galligani, who along with Riley, spent Monday packing the remnants of their restaurant.

The new owners, according to the liquor license transfer, are Priscilla Dosiou, Thomas Glenwright, Paul Schulte and Michael Timbs.

There is no plan to keep the longtime Financial District haunt alive anywhere else in the Bay Area.

Justin Phillips joined the San Francisco Chronicle in November 2016 as a food writer. He previously served as the City, Industry, and Gaming reporter for the American Press in Lake Charles, Louisiana. He extensively covered the growth and transformation of Southwest Louisiana’s multibillion dollar energy sector. Justin also served as a columnist for the American Press where he won a Louisiana-Mississippi Associated Press Media Editors award for his weekly food column. In the past, Justin spent time working in the newsrooms of the Contra Costa Times, the Tri Valley Herald, and the Oakland Tribune. He studied journalism at Louisiana Tech University.